THE

RULE AND EXERCISES

OF

HOLY DYING.

CHAP. I.

A GENERAL PREPARATION TOWARDS A HOLY AND BLESSED DEATH, BY WAY

OF CONSIDERATION.

SECT. I.

Consideration of the Vanity and Shortness of
Man's Life.

A Man is a bubble (said the Greek proverb) which Lucien represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose, saying, all the world is a storm, and men rise up in their several generations like bubbles descending à Jove pluvio, from God and the dew of heaven, from a tear and drop of man, from nature and providence and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world but to be born, that they might be able to die, others float up and down two or three

turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others; and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with a great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before. So is every man he is born in vanity and sin: he comes into the world like morning mushrooms, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulness: some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful: others ride longer in the storm; it may be until seven years of vanity be expired, and then peradventure the sun shines hot upon their heads, and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and out-lives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances like a bubble empty and gay, and shines like a dove's neck, or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are fantastical; and so he dances out the gaiety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures, only because he ist not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat,

or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humour: and to preserve a man-alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities is as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw him up from nothing, were equally the issues of an almighty power. And therefore the wise men of the world, have contended who shall best fit man's condition with words signifying his vanity and short abode. Homer calls a man a leaf, the smallest, the weakest piece of a short lived, unsteady plant. Pindar calls him the dream of a shadow: another the dream of the shadow of smoke. But St. James (Jam. iv. 14.) spake by a more excellent spirit, saying, Our life is but a vapour, viz. drawn from the earth by a celestial influence, made of smoke, or the lighter parts of water, tossed with every wind, moved by the motion of a superior body, without virtue in itself, lifted up on high, or left below, according as it pleases the sun, its foster-father. But it is lighter yet. It is but appearing; a fantastic vapour, an apparation, nothing real it is not so much as a mist, not the matter of a shower, nor substantial enough to make a cloud; but it is like Cassiopeia's chair, or Pelop's shoulder, or the circles of heaven, pavoueba, for which you cannot have a word that can signify a verier nothing. And yet the expression is one degree more made diminutive: a vapour, and fantastical, or a mere appearance, and this but for a little while neither; the very dream, the phantasm disappears in a small time, like the shadow that departeth, or, like a tale that is told, or as a

dream when one awaketh. A man is so vain, so unfixed, so perishing a creature, that he cannot long last in the scene of fancy: a man goes off, and is forgotten like the dream of a distracted person. The sum of all is this: that thou art a man, than whom there is not in the world any greater instance of heights and declensions, of lights and shadows, of misery and folly, of laughter and tears, of groans and death.

And because this consideration is of great usefulness and great necessity to many purposes of wisdom and the spirit: all the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every man, and to every creature, doth preach our funeral sermon, and calls us to look and see how the old Sexton Time throws up the earth, and digs a grave, where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies, till they rise again in a fair or in an intolerable eternity. Every revolution which the sun makes about the world* divides between life and death; and death possesses both those portions by the next morrow; and we are dead to all those months which we have already lived, and we shall never live them over again: and still God makes little periods of our age. First we change our world, when we come from the womb to feel the warmth of Then we sleep and enter into the image of

the sun.

* Nihil sibi quisqam de futuro debet promittere. Id quoque quod tenetur per manus exit, et ipsam quam premimus horam casus incidit. Volvitur tempus ratâ quidem lege, sed per obscurum. Seneca.

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death, in which state we are unconcerned in all the changes of the world: and if our mothers or our nurses die, or a wild boar destroy our vineyards, or our king be sick, we regard it not, but during that state, are as disinterested as if our eyes were closed with the clay that weeps in the bowels of the earth. At the end of seven years, our teeth fall and die before us, representing a formal prologue to the tragedy; and still every seven years it is odds but we shall finish the last scene: and when nature, or chance, or vice, takes our body in pieces, weakening some parts, and loosing others, we taste the grave, and the solemnities of our own funerals, first, in those parts that ministered to vice, and next, in them that served for ornament; and in a short time even they that served for necessity become useless, and entangled like the wheels of a broken clock. Baldness is but a dressing to our funerals, the proper ornament of mourning*, and of a person entered very far into the regions and possession of death; and we have many more of the same signification grey hairs, rotten teeth, dim eyes, trembling joints, short breath, stiff limbs, wrinkled skin, short memory, decayed appetite. Every day's necessity calls for a reparation of that portion which death fed on all night when we lay in his lap, and slept in his outer chambers. The very spirits of a man prey upon the daily portion of bread and flesh, and every meal is a rescue from one death, and lays up * Ut mortem citiùs venire credas, Scito jam capitis perîsse partem.